An issue seems to be affecting Twitterific and Tweetbot, two popular third-party clients, albeit the root reason is presently unknown. Paul Haddad, one of Tweetbot’s inventors, made a post on Mastodon stating that the corporation hasn’t spoken with developers about whether the problem is due to a bug or something else.

Twitter users and several media sites have speculated that this is part of Twitter’s plan to end support for third-party clients. The power outage, though, may not affect everyone. Though I’ve seen some users mention issues with Fenix 2, I and others have found that applications like Albatross and Fenix 2 seem to function. It is also still possible to use Twitter using Twitter’s official app.

Twitter’s application programming interface (API) is controversial since it is used by third-party applications to get data from the site. Before Elon Musk purchased the firm, things seemed to be looking well, but his stance on Twitter competitors is unclear; he doesn’t seem to have spoken anything either way.

Uncertainty persists as to whether or not the API is at fault for the downtime experienced by third-party clients. While Twitter’s official API explorer tool is presently down, I was able to test out several calls using my own Twitter developer account. It seems that many of the user-reported errors are related to authentication problems.

As of this writing, neither the official Twitter account, nor the Twitter Support account, nor Elon Musk have said anything regarding the apparent outage. Unfortunately, the firm does not have a communications division that we could contact for further information, but we will continue to monitor this situation for any updates.